Rapid and efficient ultrasonic assisted adsorption of diethyl phthalate onto FeIIFe2IIIO4@GO: ANN-GA and RSM-DF modeling, isotherm, kinetic and mechanism study

Herein, an ultrasonic assisted dispersive magnetic solid-phase adsorption method along with a high-performance liquid chromatography system for the diethyl phthalate (DEP) removal was developed. In this regard, magnetic iron oxide/graphene oxide (MGO) nanocomposites were prepared by a simple and effective chemical co-precipitation method, followed by nucleation and growth of nanoparticles. The structure and morphology of MGO was identified by Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectroscopy X-ray diffraction (XRD), Vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and N2 adsorption-desorption techniques. The interactive and main effect of parameters such as pH, adsorbent dosage, sonication time and concentration of DEP involved in the adsorption process were set within the ranges 3.0–11.0, 0.10–0.50 g L−1, 1–5 min, 5–10 mg/L, respectively. Root means square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), absolute average deviation (AAD), and coefficient of determination (R2) was employed to examine the applicability of the response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) models for the description of experimental data. Compared to RSM, the ANN showed a more accurate performance for modeling the process of DEP adsorption. Using genetic algorithm-ANN, optimum conditions were set to 5.38, 334.7 mg/L, 3.723 min and 4.21 mg/L for pH, adsorbent dose, sonication time and concentration of DEP, respectively. Under the optimized conditions, the maximum adsorption capacity and adsorption factors were 116.933 mg/g and 100%, respectively, while the relative standard deviations (RSDs) was <1.6% (N = 5). The isotherm models display that the Langmuir has the best fit with the equilibrium data, and adsorption kinetics followed the pseudo-second-order model. The thermodynamic results confirmed that the sorption was endothermic and occurred spontaneously. The results exhibited that MGO has excellent potential as an adsorbent for the removal of phthalates from the contaminated water.